Blog posts tagged user groups

User groups are among our favourite events in the calendar year. We love to bring together the organisations that use our products – from councils to highways agencies to housing associations – for a few hours to share experiences, ask questions and learn from one other. 

Last week we hosted another of our FixMyStreet Pro user groups, centred on our street, highway and environment reporting service. 

There’s a recording of the user group available to watch for anyone who wanted to come but couldn’t make it, or you can find a brief summary of what you missed below. 

Recently added features

From scheduled emergency messages to easier displaying of asset IDs on a report page, Senior Developer Chris Mytton gave us a tour of the latest features to be added to or updated for FixMyStreet Pro. Watch Chris’ session here.

Process changes and intended outcomes

Head of Product & Service Design Bekki Leaver ran a session explaining some recent changes we’ve made to our development and delivery processes, and exploring our intended outcomes for the future of the product. Take a look.

Parish councils and FixMyStreet Pro in Buckinghamshire

Matthew Somerville, our Head of Development, gave us a demo of some new functionality we’ve been working on with Buckinghamshire Council, which allows principal authorities to use FixMyStreet Pro to easily and intelligently triage reports to parish councils. Check it out.

Report status mapping

‘Don’t mark reports as fixed unless the problem has actually been fixed’ was the main take-home from developer Moray Jones’ session on making sure your report statuses are mapped correctly on FixMyStreet Pro. More on this here.

Empathy mapping

We handed back over to Bekki who guided small breakout groups through an empathy mapping exercise to answer the question: why should I add a photo to my report? Each group had a different persona and situation to explore. If you’re interested in the work Bekki does, get in touch.

Case study: Peabody housing association and FixMyStreet Pro

Tom Broad, Head of Environmental Services Thamesmead at Peabody, joined us to talk about how the housing association is using FixMyStreet Pro, which involves some complex routing of reports between Peabody and the London boroughs of Bexley and Greenwich. Watch the case study.

Communication top tips

Best practice advice for communicating FixMyStreet Pro to residents from our Marketing & PR Manager Sally Bracegirdle. See what Sally had to say.

Roundtable: problem-solving with FixMyStreet Pro

A group discussion on any shared pain points when it comes to digital street and highway reporting, and how we can look to resolve them with future development of FixMyStreet Pro. This is something we’re interested in all year round – please speak to your account manager whenever you have a suggestion to discuss.

Want to join us next time?

If you’re interested in what we do and how FixMyStreet Pro works, why not come along to our next user group to meet our community and see what the product is all about for yourself. Let us know if you’d like an invite. 

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Image: Benjamin Elliott

Last week we hosted our first user group of 2022, bringing together our community of councils and public sector organisations using FixMyStreet Pro to show them our latest features, talk about new developments and give everyone the chance to influence what we work on next.

Here’s what happened on the day:

Recently added features

Kicking the event off, senior developer Dave Arter gave us a tour of some FixMyStreet Pro’s latest features.

These include improvements to the service’s case management functionality, which now enables council staff to filter reports and assign or reassign cases to inspectors. There’s also a new councillor access portal to FixMyStreet Pro’s heatmap, on which councillors can see at a glance where problems are being reported.

Meeting our new Service Designer

Bekki Leaver introduced herself to the group and shared some of the exciting things she’ll be working on over the coming months, such as evaluating and researching the user need for some new features, facilitating our Discovery workshops and progressing our ApplyWorks service, designed to streamline the way citizens submit applications and license requests. 

Bekki also put a call out to councils who want to help test some of our new features with residents. This call is also open to non-clients, so if you’re reading this and you’d like to be involved, please get in touch.

Client case studies 

Tracy Eaton, Product Owner for FixMyStreet at Buckinghamshire Council, delivered a brilliant case study about the improvements to citizen reporting that we’ve been able to bring about together so far (such as implementing accuracy-boosting asset layers and creating category specific acknowledgement messages), and the council’s plans for further transformation using FixMyStreet Pro (watch this space!).

We also heard from Mark Peet, Program Lead at Shropshire Council, who provided an insight into how we worked together recently to understand the views of local residents, councillors, and council staff at all levels and apply what we learned to the successful and speedy rollout of the county’s new FixMyStreet Pro service. 

Understanding what motivates citizens to report problems

Our Marketing & PR Manager Sally Bracegirdle gave us a preview of some soon-to-be-published research into citizen reporting in the UK: what makes citizens want to report problems; what puts them off and what do they expect from a reporting service?

The research was carried out in collaboration with YouGov and mySociety’s Research team. We’ll publish a blog post when it’s been released to the public – keep an eye out.

Parish and town councils 

There’s a lot of complexity in the way FixMyStreet directs reports to the correct place on behalf of citizens, automatically working out which tier of council is appropriate for a report. As senior developer Matthew Somerville demonstrated, there’s still one level of council that FixMyStreet is not yet able to serve: town and parish councils. Matthew talked us through why this is and our plans for making it happen in the future.

Reviewing the roadmap

Finishing off the event, Clare Armiger, our account manager, led a review of our client development roadmap, giving attendees the chance to vote for which of their suggestions for future development we should look to take through to user research next. The winning idea was to identify more opportunities to signpost to relevant public authorities wherever the council is not responsible for a report.

And that was our January user group for FixMyStreet Pro!

Would you like to come along to the next user group?

You don’t have to be a Pro user to attend our user groups; we’re happy for guests to come along, meet our community and see what the service is all about for yourself. Let us know if you’d like an invite. 

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Image: Skye Studios

Last week we hosted another of our FixMyStreet Pro user groups. These events provide the perfect opportunity for us to get together with all of our council partners to show them what we’ve been working on and, importantly, give them the chance to influence what’s next for FixMyStreet Pro.

Senior Developer Dave Arter gave everyone a tour of all of the recently added features for FixMyStreet Pro, from a new OS Maps API and some fantastic mobile navigation improvements to extra detailed asset information and intelligent image redaction.

We also heard from Sam Pearson, mySociety’s Site Reliability Engineer who took us behind the scenes of FixMyStreet Pro. Sam gave us a fascinating glimpse into the architecture of the service, how it’s maintained and how we keep it secure for our customers. 

Councils drive our development roadmap

A highlight of our user groups is always the interactive roadmap session – this is the part where we involve councils in helping to decide what new features we should be working on next for FixMyStreet Pro. 

Starting with a runthrough of some of the new feature suggestions we’ve been receiving from our council partners recently by Operations Director Louise Howells, we then broke out into five groups to discuss each suggestion and prioritise them from most to least pressing. Under the guidance of our Designer Martin Wright, each group used Miro boards to select the one project they most wanted to see worked on, before regrouping to compare selections and choose an overall winner.

So what did our council partners choose to be worked on next for FixMyStreet Pro? Scheduled emergency messages that only appear at the correctly calculated time. This is something several councils have asked for, so we’re very happy to be getting the ball rolling.

Bouncing ideas around

As well as having a say on our development roadmap, the user groups are also a great opportunity for councils to share best practices with each other, present case studies on how FixMyStreet Pro is working for them and discuss topics of interest.

Jack Bowers, Principal Highways Liaison Officer at Central Bedfordshire, presented a brilliant case study all about how FixMyStreet Pro has, within just a few months of launching, helped the council to create fast channel shift, improve the citizen user experience and reduce reporting costs by 24%. Just what we like to hear!

We also heard from Tom Scholes, Group Manager – Asset Data & Systems at Oxfordshire County Council, who led a very engaging discussion on demand management and intervention criteria. Tom spoke about how the council often receives reports about potholes that fall below their threshold for repair. He then sought advice from other councils on how best to utilise FixMyStreet Pro to handle this without compromising the citizen experience. Some fantastic ideas were thrown around, and we’ll be on hand to support Oxfordshire to better help citizens understand what counts as an actionable report.

And that’s it! It was a very enjoyable user group, and we’re already looking forward to the next one in November, which with any luck will be an in-person event!

If you have any questions about anything mentioned above, or you’d like to be invited to the next user group, do let us know.

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Image: S O C I A L . C U T

It’s been a cold and wet May, but we haven’t let that dampen our spirits here at SocietyWorks. Here are some of the highlights from the last sprint –  it was a busy one!

FixMyStreet Pro user group

This sprint we hosted another successful user group for our FixMyStreet Pro customers. These events give our council partners the chance to catch up on all of the new features we’ve been working on for the service, and also provide the opportunity to influence our development roadmap.

Thank you to everyone who made it on the day, and a special thank you to Jack Bowers from Central Bedfordshire Council and to Tom Scholes at Oxfordshire County Council who each presented a fantastic case study for us.

We also heard from Senior Developer Dave Arter who provided an expert demonstration of the recently added FixMyStreet Pro features, which now include OS Maps with MasterMap detail, mobile navigation improvements and image redaction.

You can find out more about the user group here.

WasteWorks

If you’re a keen follower of our sprint notes, you’ve probably noticed that we’re very excited to be co-designing with councils on the new WasteWorks product.

This is a citizen-centred system for councils to manage all elements of domestic, bulky and green waste online, integrated fully into any and all in-cab systems. We’ve moved into post-go live phase with Bromley Council after launching their phase 1 of work the other week.

NoiseWorks

Sshhh!  NoiseWorks is coming….

We have been partnering with Hackney Council to develop a nuisance noise reporting system for their local residents. We have completed phase 1 and are working towards completing phase 2 of the project. Please get in touch if you would like to know more. 

Smaller projects

We have also been working across a variety of smaller projects. This includes working on Red Claims for Buckinghamshire Council, bug fixing and supporting our clients via Freshdesk. 

Putting our heads together

This sprint we also had our SocietyWorks team meeting. This was a great opportunity for us all to get together to examine our internal processes, discuss the SocietyWorks suite of products and prioritise future projects. 

If that’s not enough we have also been looking to recruit new developers so we can continue innovating, collaborating and partnering on projects that will make a difference for citizens in our communities. 

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Image: Gary Ellis

There’s been lots happening during the second sprint of the year – here’s what the SocietyWorks team has been working on.

Waste product development 

We’re very excited to have started phase two of our work on Bromley’s waste product, which includes incorporating green garden waste and payments into the service. 

We’re working closely with the team at Bromley, Capita and Veolia to create this new system.  Currently, we’re designing the prototypes for the citizen forms to understand what information we’ll need to capture and how to make this as easy as possible for the user to fill in.

Client feedback

In other waste-related news, we’ve been speaking to a few of our clients to get their feedback on features and pricing for our general waste product. We’ll also have a new name for the product confirmed in the next few weeks! If you’re interested in learning more about our new waste service, drop us a line.

GOV.UK Notify

Also this sprint, we’ve applied the finishing touches to the GOV.UK Notify work we’ve been doing for Hackney. This new service is going live on the 4th Feb and is available to all FixMyStreet Pro Gold clients – find out more about how to buy here.

Cookie banners

A hangover task from just before Christmas, we ticked updating client cookie banners off our list this sprint, making sure they’re all as up-to-date as possible.

Marketing and social media

Our new Marketing & PR Manager Sally has been getting her feet under the table and is looking at our overall Marketing goals for the next 3 years, as well as the best ways to spread the news about all the good work we do. You might have noticed during the last sprint that we now have a SocietyWorks LinkedIn account, a SocietyWorks Twitter account and a FixMyStreet Instagram page – go give us a follow!

Internal processes

We’ve taken some time this sprint to look at our internal processes, including how we operate and organise the sprint itself. This is something we’re going to be mixing up a little over the next few weeks – we’ll let you know how it goes!

User groups

Last but definitely not least, with it being February already (we know, we’re shocked too), we’ve started to plan for our summer user groups. We look forward to running these groups every year, and this one is no different. If you’re not familiar with them, have a read of this blog post about our most recent user group and keep an eye out for more details coming soon.

Image: William Santos on Unsplash

When it comes to drawing up plans for future features to add to the FixMyStreet Pro roadmap, it’s really important to us that we consult with the people who will actually be using them before we commit to anything.

That’s why we like to run user groups – events to which we invite clients to join us for a couple of hours to learn about what we’ve been working on and get involved in exploring any features which would be of benefit to them if we were to design them next.

Digital collaboration

Not wanting to let the pandemic get in our way of hosting these sessions in 2020, we moved them online, using Zoom to meet up and Miro to collaboratively share ideas.

Our most recent user group ran earlier this month as a perfect way to round off the year and influence our 2021 plans.

As part of the session, we broke off into small groups in order to answer this question: What’s the one thing you wished FixMyStreet Pro did that it doesn’t currently do?

Using Miro, each group was given 15 minutes to bounce ideas around for new features they would like to see on the FixMyStreet Pro service by pinning a digital post-it note to a board. Each idea was then discussed to determine what the feature is, what problem it solves and who would benefit from it. 

Before reconvening, the groups selected their favourite idea to be presented to everyone. The top ideas from each group were then voted upon to determine which was best, using a very snazzy feature of Miro’s platform.

Fast reactions

On this occasion, the winning new feature suggestion was to introduce the functionality to quickly create a report on a mobile device from a photo. Alex Brown from Island Roads, whose idea this was, explained more:

“If you’re familiar with iPhones and Android, you’ll know that there’s a share function which gives you a shortlist of things you can do with your photos.

“For example, you can open up a photo, press the share button, select your messages app and it takes you straight into the app where you can send the photo to one of your contacts.

“We’d like something similar to that [for FixMyStreetPro], where you can take a photo with your camera, open it, share it, hit FixMyStreet and it takes you straight into the app so you can log your report.”

As our Designer Martin said at the time: “Brilliant!”

A simple, yet smart idea that would make it even easier for citizens to act when they spot a problem within their local area. Plus, as we uncovered recently, reports with photos are around 15% more likely to be recorded as fixed than reports without a photo, so anything we can do to encourage the use of photos within reports can only be a good thing.

And here lies the beauty of running these user groups: not only is it the perfect opportunity for local authorities to discuss and share solutions to problems they’re facing, but it’s also the ideal environment to nurture brilliant ideas that we hadn’t thought of before. 

Going forward, we’re taking Alex’s idea, along with a few other suggestions from the day, into some discovery sessions in order to determine whether and when we can add them to our roadmap.

So, watch this space!

If you would like to come along to one of our future user groups, or you’d like to discuss any ideas of your own, do drop us a message.

Image: Dstudio Bcn on Unsplash